How to Extract Email Addresses from Trello and Asana Exports

Why Project Management Exports Contain Useful Emails

If you have been running projects on Trello or Asana for any length of time, there are email addresses buried inside those boards and projects. Every collaborator, every person who got assigned a task, every client who was mentioned in a comment. Those addresses are sitting in the data, and when you export it, they come along.

A project archive can contain collaborator addresses you still need for handover or record keeping. Export it and review the addresses before deleting the original records.

Project management tools are actually quite rich sources of contact information, because people use real email addresses to join and collaborate. Unlike random web scraping where you get a mix of everything, PM tool exports tend to give you addresses of people you have genuinely worked with.

How Trello Exports Work

Trello lets you export board data as JSON files. You go to the board menu, click "More", then "Print and Export", and choose the JSON option. The exported file contains everything about that board. Cards, lists, comments, members, activity logs. All of it packed into one JSON file.

The JSON structure is nested and quite detailed. Member information sits in a members array, and each member object includes their username and sometimes their email. But emails also appear scattered throughout the file in comments, card descriptions, and activity entries where people have typed or pasted addresses.

Here is what to do:

1. Open your Trello board in the browser
2. Go to Board Menu, then More, then Print and Export
3. Select JSON export and save the file
4. Open Email Extractor
5. Upload the JSON file
6. Review the extracted addresses and download your list

The JSON export from Trello can be quite large if the board has been active for months or years. Email Extractor handles JSON files natively, so it will parse through the entire structure and pull out every email address pattern it finds.

How Asana Exports Work

Asana gives you CSV exports. You can export a project from the project menu by clicking the dropdown arrow next to the project name and selecting "Export" then "CSV". The CSV file includes task names, assignees, descriptions, due dates, and other fields.

Email addresses in Asana exports usually appear in assignee columns and in task descriptions or comments where people have shared contact information. The assignee field sometimes shows the full email rather than just a display name, depending on your workspace settings.

Steps for Asana:

1. Open the project you want to export
2. Click the dropdown arrow beside the project name
3. Select Export, then CSV
4. Save the file to your computer
5. Upload it to Email Extractor
6. Check the results and download

One thing worth knowing is that Asana also offers a JSON export through its API if you are comfortable with that. The API export tends to include more detail than the standard CSV, including email addresses of all workspace members who touched the project.

Other Project Management Tools

This same approach works with basically any PM tool that lets you export data.

Email Extractor supports all the file formats listed above. JSON, CSV, XLSX, HTML, Markdown. So regardless of which tool you are exporting from, you can upload the file and extract addresses.

What Kind of Emails You Will Find

The emails you pull from PM tool exports are typically quite valuable because they belong to people in your professional network. These are not random addresses scraped from the internet. They are colleagues, clients, contractors, freelancers, and collaborators who were actively involved in your projects.

You might find:

• Team members who have since left the organisation
• External contractors who worked on specific tasks
• Client contacts who were added as guests
• Stakeholders who were mentioned in comments
• Vendors or partners who communicated through task comments

This makes PM tool exports particularly useful for rebuilding a contact list after a team restructure, or when you are moving to a new platform and want to make sure you have not lost anyone's details.

Dealing with Duplicate and Internal Addresses

When you extract from PM exports, you will likely get a lot of duplicate addresses because the same people appear across multiple tasks and comments. Email Extractor removes duplicates automatically, so your final list will be clean.

You might also want to separate internal team addresses from external contacts. If your company uses a domain like @yourcompany.com, you can easily filter those out after extraction. Download the list and sort it, or open it in a spreadsheet and filter by domain.

For large organisations with multiple domains, you might need to do a bit more filtering. But the point is that the raw extraction gives you everything, and then you decide what to keep.

Combining Exports from Multiple Tools

If your team uses different tools for different purposes, maybe Trello for one project and Asana for another, you can extract from each export separately and then merge the lists. Email Extractor handles multiple file types in a single session, so you could upload a Trello JSON and an Asana CSV one after another.

The source tracking feature shows which file each address came from, which is helpful when you want to remember the context. You might see that a particular contact appeared in your Trello board but not in the Asana project, telling you which project they were involved with.

Privacy Considerations

Project management exports can contain sensitive project information alongside the email addresses. The good thing about using Email Extractor is that everything happens in your browser. The files never leave your computer, and no data gets sent to any server. This matters especially when you are dealing with client projects where confidentiality is important.

Still, be thoughtful about what you do with extracted addresses. Just because someone collaborated on a Trello board does not mean they want to receive marketing emails from you. These are professional contacts, so treat them accordingly. Use the addresses for legitimate professional communication, not mass email campaigns.

If you want to understand more about keeping extraction ethical, have a look at our privacy guide.

Can I extract emails from a Trello board without exporting first?

No, you need to export the board data first. Email Extractor works with files, not directly with Trello's interface. Export the board as JSON, then upload that file.

Does this work with free accounts on Trello and Asana?

Yes. Both Trello and Asana allow data exports on their free tiers. The export options might be slightly more limited, but you can still get CSV or JSON files that contain email addresses.

What if the export file is very large?

Email Extractor runs in your browser, so it can handle reasonably large files. Trello JSON exports for active boards might be several megabytes, which is fine. If you have an extremely large export, it might take a moment to process, but it should work without issues.